About The General Will

The General Will is a website designed to facilitate the massive analysis, rewriting and creation of legislative documents. It uses unique facilitation techniques to promote consensus building from disparate points of view. As consensus emerges, so does the legislation. This site is under active development and will periodically be rebuilt, losing all data. At some point it will become stable, but this will not be soon.

It will import documents from the United States Library of Congress. To do this locate a bill and navigate to the XML version of the bill. Copy the URL and paste it into the URL field on the home page. You will need to sign up with the General Will and login first. You can also type the bill number directly into the url field, e.g: hr 3261, and the site will import all versions of the bill.

The site will also import legislation from the Massachusetts legislative website malegislature.gov. To do this type the bill number directly into the url box on the home page but also prefix the bill number with "ma" to indicate it is legislation from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

You can read more on the General Will Google+ page